A library ages well

Monday will mark 15 years since that cold, rainy day when former and current U.S. presidents along with numerous celebrities gathered in Little Rock. More than 25,000 people turned out for a dedication ceremony despite the weather.

“It was a day for ducks,” Chris Givens and Scott Johnson wrote on the front page of this newspaper. “Mother Nature vied for attention on dedication day for the Clinton Presidential Center, drenching spectators after event officials had told them to leave umbrellas at home. As the weather worsened, people went from contemplating how to stay dry to wondering if they would ever be warm again. …

“The day started on a promising note. Early in the morning, the sun struggled to peek out after a smattering of showers. But within a few hours, the sky darkened, rain fell and the temperature dropped.

“Most spectators—including celebrities, the curious, the powerful and the faithful—shivered in the cold. Some decided that the wet was insurmountable and left early. For those who persevered, however, the message delivered by a sitting president and three of his predecessors was one of hope and the future.”

My mother-in-law, my wife and our two sons (ages 11 and 7 at the time) left early for a meal at a nearby restaurant when the wet and cold became too much. I was among the lucky ones that day. I was working in the governor’s office and was scheduled to fly immediately after the event with Gov. Mike Huckabee to a Republican Governors Association meeting in New Orleans.

Karl Rove, a key adviser to President George W. Bush, had flown into Little Rock with the president on Air Force One and planned to fly to New Orleans with Huckabee and me aboard what we jokingly referred to as Arkansas One, a propeller-driven Beechcraft King Air owned by the Arkansas State Police. We kidded Rove about having dined on fine china on the way from Washington to Little Rock and then getting to eat a sandwich out of a cardboard box on the flight to the Crescent City.

Because I would be leaving quickly with Huckabee and Rove, I was allowed to stay warm and dry inside the presidential library and watch the celebrities pass by—Barbra Streisand, Kevin Spacey, Ted Danson, Morgan Freeman, Robin Williams, Al Gore, John Kerry, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Bono, The Edge.

“Robin Williams’ camouflage jacket and fishing hat set a striking contrast to Streisand’s black fur coat and scarf,” Givens and Johnson wrote. “The two sat together in the audience.”

Fifteen years later, I’m in the Grand Hall of the Clinton Center on a beautiful Sunday afternoon with several hundred other people. We’re listening to Hampton native and well-known film producer and director Harry Thomason talk about his new book.

Thomason is a prime example of what a small state this is. He was once a high school football coach and a friend of my father, who sold athletic supplies to high schools across the state.

As I look around the room, I think about how well this facility has aged. It has become part of the fabric of life in Arkansas. I can’t begin to count the number of interesting speakers I’ve heard and fun events I’ve attended in the Grand Hall.

Next door in the old Choctaw Station, built in 1901 for the Choctaw, Oklahoma & Gulf Railroad (a building that would later become the Rock Island depot), the University of Arkansas’ Clinton School of Public Service speaker series is among the best amenities of living in central Arkansas. I’ve been to dozens of lectures there through the years. There have been almost 1,400 public programs including speeches by 47 ambassadors, 24 Pulitzer Prize winners and seven Nobel Prize recipients. All programs are free.

Arkansas is fortunate to have a presidential library, especially one that tells the story of a public figure as polarizing as Bill Clinton. Almost two decades after leaving office, Americans remain intrigued by Clinton and his legacy. There are only 13 of these libraries, most of which are administered by the National Archives. They contain records, papers, collections and additional materials for every president from Herbert Hoover through George W. Bush. The Barack Obama Presidential Center is scheduled to be constructed in Jackson Park near the University of Chicago campus.

The archives at the Clinton Center contain about 2 million photographs, 21 million email messages, 80 million pages of documents, and 80,000 artifacts. More than 112,000 people and organizations donated to the library, including a number of foreign governments and business leaders. The fundraising for and construction of presidential libraries don’t come without controversy (read the stories of what’s going on in Chicago, where politics is a contact sport and the groundbreaking for Obama’s library keeps getting pushed back), but the Clinton Center has remained remarkably fresh with a steady stream of temporary exhibits and fascinating programs. Its restaurant, 42 Bar & Table, has become one of the capital city’s best places to dine.

Permanent exhibits, which continue to attract visitors to Little Rock from around the world, are housed in an area inspired by the Long Room in the Old Library at Trinity College in Dublin, which Clinton first saw when he was a Rhodes Scholar.

Preliminary planning for the library began in 1997 soon after Clinton had been elected to a second term. In 1999, Clinton announced that the library would be designed by internationally famous architect James Polshek. Another well-known figure, Ralph Appelbaum, was hired to design the exhibits.

Groundbreaking took place Dec. 5, 2001. The early cost estimate for building the library was $125 million; the price later topped $165 million.

The Clinton School of Public Service officially opened Nov. 18, 2004, with former U.S. Sen. David Pryor as its founding dean. The school was the first in the world to offer a master’s degree in public service. The first class for the two-year academic program was admitted in 2005.

Unlike other schools associated with presidential libraries, the Clinton School did not take over existing academic departments and facilities. It started from scratch. Skip Rutherford, the school’s current dean, likes to talk about the life that students add to downtown Little Rock.

“The River Market serves as our student union, and the main library of the Central Arkansas Library System is our library,” he says. “Our students, faculty and staff support the area’s coffee shops, restaurants, stores and museums. Many of the students live downtown. Those students have come from schools such as Cornell, Harvard, Middlebury, Wellesley, the University of North Carolina and the London School of Economics. They also have come from colleges and universities across Arkansas. Two of the past three student body presidents at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville ended up at the Clinton School.”

The school uses a project-based learning model in which students are taught skills in the classroom for later use on three major projects—a team-based project, an international project and an individual project. In an alumni survey, 85 percent of respondents said their Clinton School project work helped them in job placement.

The school has hosted 36 visiting scholars. There have been 13 graduating classes with two classes in progress. More than 1,000 field service projects have been completed, and students have worked in 92 countries.